Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  My mother and grandmother came in, not knowing I was there, and talked. “I told you he’s coming!” my mother said. “He’ll come and find us here!” She spoke angrily and joyfully, as I had never heard her speak.

  “May it not happen!” my grandmother said, angry without joy.

  At that I came out of the dark corner and ran to my grandmother, crying, “Don’t let it come! Don’t let it come find us!”

  My mother said, “Come to me, Condor’s Daughter.”

  I went partway, and stopped. I stood between them, and said, “That is not my name.”

  My mother was still for two breaths, and then said, “Don’t be afraid. You’ll see.”

  She began setting out food to cook supper, as if nothing had happened or was happening. Valiant took her wood drum and went down to our heyimas. People drummed in all the heyimas, that evening.

  It was in the last great heat of the year, and people were out on the balconies for the cool after dark. I heard people talking about the condor. Agate, the Librarian of the Madrone, began to say a recital piece called “The Flight of the Great One,” which he had made from an old written record by a Finder in the library; it told of the Inland Sea and the Range of Light, the Omorn Sea and the Range of Heaven, the deserts of sage and the prairies of grass, the Mountain of the North and the Mountain of the South, all as the condor would see them flying. Agate’s voice was beautiful, and when he read or told one listened and entered into space and quietness. I wished he would speak all night. When the telling was done there was silence for a while; then people began to talk quietly again. Neither Valiant nor Willow was there. People did not notice me, and so they spoke of the Condor as they would not have done in the presence of my family.

  Shell was waiting for my grandmother to come back from the heyimas. She said, “If those people are coming back, this time we should not let them stay in the Valley”

  “They’re in the Valley already,” Hound said. “They won’t go. They are here to have a war.”

  “Nonsense,” Shell said, “don’t talk like a boy, at your age.”

  Hound, like Agate, was an educated person, who often travelled to Kastoha-na and Wakwaha to read and talk with other scholar. He said, “Blue Clay Woman, the reason I say that is that I have talked with men of the Warrior Lodge in the Upper Valley, and what are warriors but people who make war? And these are our own people, Five-House people of the Valley of the Na, these Warriors. But they have been talking and lending their minds to Condor people, for ten years now, in those towns.”

  Old Cave Woman, whose last name had come to her when she went blind, said, “Hound, do you mean these Condor people are sick, that they have their heads on crooked?”

  He said, “Yes, I mean that.”

  Somebody farther down the balcony asked, “Are they all men, as people say?”

  Hound said, “All that come here are men. Armed.”

  Shell said, “But listen here, they can’t go around smoking tobacco day after day, year after year, that’s nonsense! If some men in those big towns up-Valley want to act like boys of fifteen and run around playing war, what’s that to us here? All we have to do is just tell the foreigners to keep moving on.”

  Mouse Dance, who was then speaker of my heyimas, said, “They can do us no harm. We walk the gyre.”

  Hound said, “And they the wheel, and the power builds!”

  “Keep to the gyre,” Mouse Dance said. He was a kind, strong man. I wanted to listen to him, not to Hound. I was sitting back against the wall of the house, because I felt like staying under the eaves, out of sight from the sky. Between my feet something was lying on the floor of the balcony; in the starlight it looked like a bit of stick or string. I picked it up. It was dark, stiff, thin, and long. I knew what it was: it was the word I must learn to speak.

  I got up and took it to Cave Woman and pushed it into her hand, saying, “Take this, please, it’s for you,” because I wanted to be rid of it, and Cave Woman was very old, wise, and weak.

  She felt it and then held it out towards me. She said, “North Owl, keep it. It was spoken to you.” Her eyes looked straight through me in the starlight that was the inside of a cave to her. I had to take the feather back.

  She spoke more kindly then. She said, “Don’t be afraid. Your hands are a child’s hands, they are running water through the wheel. They don’t hold, they let go, they make clean.” Then she began to rock her body, and closed her blind eyes, and she said, “Heya, Condor’s Daughter, in the dry land, think of the creeks running! Heya, Condor’s Daughter, in the dark house, think of the blue clay bowl!”

  “I am not Condor’s Daughter!” I said. The old woman just opened her eyes and laughed and said, “It seems the condor says you are.”

  I turned to go indoors, upset and ashamed, and Cave Woman said, “Keep the feather, child, till you can give it back.”

  I went into our rooms and put the black feather into the lidded basket Willow had made for me to keep hehole and remembering things in. Seeing it in the lamplight, dead black, longer than an eagle feather, I began to feel proud that it had come to me. If I had to be different from other people, then let my difference be notable, I thought.

  My mother was at the Blood Lodge, my grandmother was at the heyimas. Through the southwest windows I heard the rain-sound of the drums. Through the northeast windows I heard the little owl speak in the oak trees: u-u-u-u-u-u-u. I went to sleep alone, thinking of the condor and listening to the owl.

  On the first day of the Wine, some Madidinou people came saying that a lot of Condor men were coming down into the Valley over the Mountain from Clear Lake. Ninepoint was going down with his family to pick in the Great Shipa vineyards on the Valley floor, and I went to work with them. While we were picking, people came by saying that the Condor men were coming on the Old Straight Road, and we went there to see them pass. The image in my mind must be a memory, but it is like a wall-painting, bright, crowded, and unmoving; black and red condor-heads in rows, legs and hooves of big horses, gunstocks, wheels. In my mind’s image the wheels do not turn.

  When we got back to Sinshan the wakwa was beginning, and by sunset the drinking was well along. Yellow Adobe people were laughing and dancing in the common place, and starting to make whip heyiya-ifs, and people of the other Houses were drinking to catch up. Some children joined in the whips, but they soon became more roughhouse than dance, and most of us with first names went up into the balconies to watch the adults get wild. Dada of Old Red House, who was adult but could not think well, came with us. I had never watched the Wine very long before; it had scared and bored me. Now, being nine, I was ready to see it. What I saw was the Reversal. Everybody I knew had become somebody I did not know. The common place was white with moonlight and bonfires and floodlights and crowded with the dancing and the whips and the people clowning: A lot of the adolescents were playing throw-the-pole, and were up and down ladders and stairs and all over the roofs and balconies and in the trees, like shadows, laughing and calling. An Obsidian doctor, Peak, a shy, solemn man, had gone to his heyimas and got one of the big penises that the Blood Clowns use in the Moon dances, and he had strapped it on and was running around poking it at all the women from behind. He shoved it at Corntassel, and she clapped her legs together on it and jumped forward: the strap broke, Peak fell flat on his face, and she ran off with the big penis yelling, “I got the doctor’s medicine!” I saw Agate talking very loud, and dignified Shell dusty and stumbling about after falling off the end of a whip, and my grandmother Valiant dancing with a bottle of wine.

  Then the first of the Doumiadu ohwe came out of the Yellow Adobe heyimas and across the Hinge, uncoiling and uncoiling as it came till its winged head was three times a person’s height and swayed above the lights and fires. Everyone held still as it began to weave the pattern, and then the drums began and the whips went singing after the Doumiadu ohwe as it coiled along the paths from house to house. I had drunk a lot more wine that evening than I had ever d
runk before, and now I felt that I had to hold onto the balcony railing to keep from floating off into the air. The Doumiadu ohwe came coiling down among the trees from Up the Hill House and closer and closer to High Porch House. Its yellow head paused at our balcony and turned slowly, the eyes looking at each one of us: inside the great eye a small, deep, bright eye. Then it passed on, coiling and swaying in time with the drums. Dada had crouched down hiding his face from the Doumiadu ohwe. A little boy of our house called Morning Lark was crying with fear, and I was comforting him, when another child said, “Look, who’s that?” Some people had come across the bridge and were standing near Gairga oaks. They wore black, and stood there tall and still, like vultures in a tree looking down.

  People looked at them and then went on dancing the Wine. The Doumiadu ohwe was going back towards the dancing place, and flute players were leading a stampdance in the common place. A Yellow Adobe woman went up to the tall people and spoke to them, waving her arms, and then took them over to the common place, where the, wine barrels were set up on sawhorses. Four of them stayed there to drink; but the fifth one came back across the place, past the lights, through the dancing, to High Porch House. Looking down from the balcony I saw my mother Willow coming across from the Hinge, and at the foot of the steps of our household they met.

  I ran into our second room. Soon I heard steps come up the stairs and come into our hearthroom. She called me. I went into the hearthroom. He was standing there. His black wings hung down and his red, beaked head touched the ceiling.

  My mother said, “North Owl, your father’s hungry. Is there anything fit to eat in the house?”

  That was what we always said in Sinshan when people came, and they always said, “Only my heart was hungry to see you,” and then we brought out food and ate together. But my father did not know what to say. He stood there looking down at me. My mother told me to heat up corn and beans on the stove. While I did that I could look sideways at the man and see that he had a man’s face. I had not been sure if the condor’s head and beak were his headdress or his head. When he took the helmet off, I looked sideways again. He was a beautiful man, with a long nose, wide cheeks, and long, narrow eyes. He was looking at my mother Willow. She was lighting the oil lamp we used at table. So much beauty had come to her that for that moment I did not know I was looking at my mother but saw a stranger, a Four-House person standing there with brightness in her hands.

  They talked as well as they could. My father knew only parts and pieces of our language. Not many people from outside the Valley had come to Sinshan in my lifetime, but I had heard traders from the north coasts and an Amaranth man from the Inland Sea talking as he did—trying to pour water into a broken pot, as the saying is. His groping after the pieces of language he needed was funny, and I saw that he was a human person, however strange he was.

  Willow poured wine for the three of us, and we sat down together. My father was so big and long-legged that he made the table far too small and low.

  He ate all the corn and beans I had reheated, and said to me, “Very good! Good cook!”

  “North Owl is a good cook, and a good herder and reader, and has walked once now on the mountain,” my mother said. As she seldom praised me, I felt as if I had just drunk the whole jar of wine. She went on, “If you’ve had enough to eat for now, husband, come out and drink. We all dance the Wine tonight. And I want everybody in this town to see you!” She laughed as she spoke. He looked at her, perhaps not understanding much of what she said, but with so much liking and admiration that my heart began to warm to him. My mother looked back at him smiling, and said, “While you were gone, a lot of people kept telling me that you were gone. Now that you’re here I’d like to tell them that you’re here!”

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “Come on, then,” she said. “You too, North Owl.”

  “What you call baby?” my father asked.

  My mother repeated my name.

  I said, “I’m not a baby.”

  “Girl,” my mother said.

  “Girl,” he said, and we all laughed.

  “What is owl?” he asked.

  I said what the little owl says: u-u-u-u-u-u-u.

  “Aha!” he said. “Owl. Come on, Owl.” He held out his hand to me. It was the biggest hand I had ever seen or touched. I took it, and we followed my mother down into the dancing.

  Willow was full of beauty that night, full of power. She was proud, she was great. She drank, but it was not the wine that made her great; it was the power that for nine years had been pent up in her, and was now set free.

  She dances there, she dances there,

  She dances where she went

  Laughing among the people.

  It flashes, it vanishes,

  Firelight along the water.

  My grandmother got drunk and disorderly, and spent the night in the barns, gambling. When I came up to bed I took my bedding out on the balcony so that my mother and father could have the rooms to themselves. I was happy thinking about that as I went to sleep, and the noise around town did not bother me at all. Other children slept on the balcony or in another household when their parents wanted to be by themselves, and now I was like those children. As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

  A year before this now where I write this page, after the Ma-drone Lodge people had asked me to write this story of my life, I went to Giver Ire’s daughter, the story writer, and asked if she could teach me how to write a story, for I did not know how to go about it. Among other things Giver suggested to me was that in writing the story I try to be as I was at the time of which I am writing. This has been a good deal easier than I thought it would be, until now, this place now, where my father has come into the house.

  It is hard to remember how little I knew. And yet Giver’s advice is sound; for now that I know who my father was, why he was there and how he came, who the Condor people were and what they were doing, now that I am learned in such matters, it is my old ignorance, in itself valueless, that is valuable, useful, and powerful. We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth.

  The sorrow of my parents’ life is that they could see with one eye only.

  All that grieved me—that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly—was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.

  With one eye I see Willow, Valiant’s daughter, of the Blue Clay of Sinshan, who had married a Houseless man, and had a daughter and eight sheep in the family and the use of several gathering trees and a seedgrass place. With the man’s hands to work they could do more gardening, and make more, and so perhaps do more giving than taking of things and food, which is a great pleasure, and live respected, without any shame.

  With the other eye I see Terter Abhao, True Condor, Commander of the Army of the South, who was off duty with his troops for the autumn and winter, awaiting orders for the spring campaign. He had brought his three hundred back to the Valley of the Na because he knew the people there were rich and tractable, and would house and feed his men well; and also because he had had a girl in one of the towns there, nine years ago, when he was a fifty-commander, on the first exploration of the South, and he had not forgotten her. Nine years is a long time, and no doubt she had married some farmer of her tribe and had a litter of brats, but even so, he would come by the village and see her.

  So he came, and found his hearthfire lighted, his dinner ready, his wife and daughter welcoming him home.

  That was what he did not know
that he did not know.

  From that first night of the Wine he lived in our household. Most people in town had no ill will towards him, since he was Willow’s husband and had finally come back, but none of the Houses of Earth took him in. Even in Sinshan there lived one person born outside the Valley; Walker of Blue Walls House had come from the north coasts with traders thirty years before, and had stayed in the Valley, and married Toyon of the Yellow Adobe; and the Serpentine heyimas had taken him in. In the big towns, of course, there are many such people, and in Tachas Touchas they say that all of them came from somewhere in the north, houseless people, how many hundreds of years ago. I do not know why none of the Houses took my father, but I guess that their councils saw that it would not do. He would have had to study, to learn what every child in the heyimas knew already, and he would not have borne it, since he believed he knew all he needed to know. A door seldom opens itself to the man who shuts it. Maybe he did not even know there was a door. He was busy.

  Through the councils of the Houses and the Planting Lodges of the four towns of the Lower Valley he made arrangements for his three hundred. They were given Eucalyptus Pastures to use for their camp and horse-grazing, down on the northeast side of the River below Ounmalin. The four towns agreed to give them some corn, potatoes, and beans, and let them hunt from the Hummocks down the inner northeast hills to the Saltmarshes, fish the River below the confluence of Kimi Creek, and take shellfish anywhere east of the East Mouth of the Na. It was a good deal to give, but, as people said, the only wealth is spending; and though three hundred men would eat a lot, it was understood that they would leave the Valley after the Sun, before the World.

  That my father would go with them never entered my head. He was home, he was here, our family was whole; now everything was as it should be, balanced, complete; and so it would not change.